Visualization of Information Technology (IT) infrastructures with hundreds or thousands of elements requires presentation of a very large number of objects in a limited real estate of graphic interfaces. Currently node-link diagrams are used to represent IT components. In node-link diagrams, elements of the IT infrastructure are represented as nodes with links among them that represent physical connections, dependency, composition and other types of relations. Each object (i.e., nodes and links) presented by the visualization often has large number of other objects and/or attributes related to it. Some attributes, such as name or class of the object, are used for identification. These attributes have to be presented to the user for information purposes or in form of a menu of action applicable to the object.
Existing visualization tools use overview mechanisms that simply present a zoomed-out view of the IT infrastructure. In a typical overview, users can see all of the elements at a glance and navigate among them to some extent, but they lose the ability to visually identify these elements. Moreover, most visualization mechanisms present relationships between objects in the form of lines or curves linking the objects. These relationships also have attributes. As the number of visualized elements grows, the overview loses more and more identification information. At some point the overview becomes just an undifferentiated mishmash of dots and lines and its value as a tool for navigation significantly decreases.